w/mo2h #4: composting with worms, part three

part three: better living with worms

So, we've gotten a worm composter. We've already dealt with some issues. What now?

Bedding. Worms are not princesses; this doesn't have to be a too hard, too soft, gotta get it just right sort of thing. When you start a new tray, they just need something that has good circulation of air and won't break down too quickly. The list of options can get pretty extensive, but shredded paper product, dry shredded leaves, peat moss, and yard clippings all work. Most people recommend a "mixed bed" using a couple of different materials, and adding water to get it to the right moisture level. Some recommend making sure they have something gritty in there (sand, soil) to help the worms digest everything, but I've also read that food scraps have enough gritty bits for the worms.

Pasty Peat! (sounds like a bad pirate name...)

I use a half bucket of peat moss mixed with a couple handfuls of lime (Journey to Forever-recommended, but other sites have said that lime is not necessary. Maybe I'll try it without one time to see how it goes.). Then I start adding water and stir it up with a 3-prong cultivator or fork until it gets more on the pasty side and less on the crumbly side. It's not an exact science unless you really want it to be! After that I mix a couple large handfuls of shredded paper and spread that out in the new top tray. Remember that these trays have holes in the bottom; a pizza box lid works perfectly to help transport trays with the least amount dropping.

One new tray, ready to go!

Food (Concerns). They can eat pretty much any organic material (we're talking the general natural-not-man-made sort of "organic", not the over-priced inconsistently-regulated sort.) like paper products, fruits, grains, vegetables, garden trimmings (disease-free, please!). 

I have read various advice about what not to feed your worms. Citrus, onion, garlic, meat, dairy, fats/oils, fish, bones, etc. Again, Journey to Forever's advice was the best: go for it, but try them each in small quantities first. If you aren't sure, look up the type of food to find out if there are any concerns. Citrus may be too strong for worms, so you'll find that it's use is recommended sparingly; too many grains may cause overheating of the compost; meat/dairy/oils may cause bad smells. Paper and veg products are generally safe, so start there and add other stuff in small amounts. You might get smell, the worms might not be able to decompose it, but in smaller quantities you'll have a much better change of thwarting another Thanksgiving Day massacre-type event.

Our happy worm home :)

Feeding and Layers. So, we keep a "Happy Worm Food" jar in the kitchen. We put in diced food scraps and take it down to them every few days. Right now I would like to get at least one tray through the process, without incident and without putting in any "iffy" food stuffs. I put each bunch of scraps in a new pile under the bedding (using a fork, trowel, or cultivator!) in a grid system - think Tic-Tac-Toe board. Your "working" tray - the topmost tray that is receiving food scraps - should have the bedding on top and the food underneath.

Harvesting and Rotating Beds. Once all your food pile spots are full, it's ready to sit to allow the worms to process the scraps, and you're ready to start a new bed for new scraps. The worms can travel among the beds by using the holes in the bottom of each tray. So make a fresh "working" tray and put it on top of the older tray. The worms will migrate up as they are ready, and you can start putting food scraps in to attract them. The trick is that the bottom-most tray should always have sheets of paper in the bottom to prevent them from going through the holes into the drip tray; so the very first tray you make will have paper in the bottom.

It's compost!

Once the bottom tray looks dark and rich and you can't really see much left of your scraps, then it's compost! We keep a large bucket to put the finished compost in; haven't yet decided when we'll use it but it's certainly going to go in the garden. I use a gloved hand to pull out some of the worms that are still in there, but you don't have to as long as most of your worms have already migrated up to the other newer trays.

Once you take out that bottom tray, you should make sure that the new bottom tray has the paper in the bottom of the tray so the worms don't drop. This has been a bit tricky for me to figure out. If upper trays have had no bottom lining so the worms can migrate up, but the food scraps have to stay underneath of the bedding, how can I put paper under all of this or transfer it all into a papered tray? My solution: dump the material for the bottom-most processing tray into a new paper-lined tray, and then cover with a light layer of the new bedding for the new working tray. 

Worm life and reproduction. Without getting into too much detail, they will reproduce themselves to sustain life in your composter. If you give them plenty of food and bedding, they'll keep reproducing; if you stop feeding them as much, they won't reproduce as much. Or something like that. Suffice to say it's population control and it's based on what you give them. I told you I didn't want to go into detail! I'm sure my worms have been cranking out the babies because I still have good population in there these 4-5 months after purchase; I just haven't sought out their little hatchling capsules.

Worm Tea: not for drinking!

Worm Tea. Excess water drips through the trays into the trip tray, and can be disposed of using the spigot. But don't toss this down the drain!  Save it as an excellent plant fertilizer! Liquid gold, I tell ya!

Other Considerations. There are other things you need to watch out for; generally, checking in once a week is a good idea. Environmental temperature of 60-80F - colder or hotter and you'll have to do some extra work. Compost temperature - if it's getting quite hot, it's the result of environmental temp or types of food and there are solutions. Moisture - too damp, add dry shredded paper; too dry, add water or wet food. Bugs and Smells - types of food and moisture levels.

Perks. Year-round compost production. Indoor or outdoor operation. Only requires work every 4-6 weeks. No pet sitter - can be left as is for several weeks at a time. 

So, would you consider composting with worms?

Much Love,

Able-Bodied Girl

  

w/mo2h #4: composting with worms, part two

part two: the great worm suicide, the thanksgiving day massacre, and other issues

When we last left off, our fearless worm-lover had started her composting adventure, not yet realizing the worm trajedies about to befall her...

I don't remember where I read it, but I had heard that the worms get really confused when they are first put into the composter. They decide to find the darkest spot and - even though the bed you just put them in is nice and dark and food-rich - they opt to crawl out.

Thus, the great worm suicide. I put them under a window. I put a small light directly shining on the lid. And yet a dozen or so (which is actually very little of the pound) crawled out to their death on the floor of the basement. Do not fear though! Had I taken the time to get a high-powered workshop light over there, I probably would not have any problem with suicidal worms. But it is apparently a common issue. If you are not fond of seeing worms, but are willing to try vermicomposting, I suggest laying some newspaper extending a few feet from all sides; if you do have any suicides, it'll be easy to roll them up.

The first couple of months went very well. We cut up our food scraps into bite-sized pieces (human bites, not worm bites :-P) and buried them under the bedding as directed. We created a good bit of food for them, but they seemed to be eating it. By the time I had buried little piles all through the first tray, the first pile in that tray was decidedly less distinguishable than the newer scraps.

As Thanksgiving approached, I figured we would need another tray to accommodate all the scraps as we hosted 6 adults for the holiday weekend. So I made it a couple of weeks in advance so the worms could start migrating up to the new tray and get acclimated. (More on how to make your bedding in part three!) That weekend, we added scraps and more scraps and even more scraps. The top tray filled pretty quickly, and we stopped giving them any more. Out came the old kitchen bucket and we started hauling out to the brush again.

I didn't think much of it until a couple of weeks later. I checked on the progress, and lo-n-behold, the progress was slow. I had overwhelmed them. With too much to eat in too little time, combined with some of the types of scraps we put in (like fruit skins), fruit flies multiplied, en masse. December was a crazy month of holidays and travel, so I didn't look into it further. I just put out some fruit fly death soup (apple cider vinegar, sugar, water, and a little dish soap - it all tastes yummy until they lose their footing!), swatted them away when we used the finished part of the basement, and hoped that I hadn't ruined my wormies. We opted to stop feeding them for a while, until things got back to normal.

Had I read the website and booklet, I would have learned a simple trick for containing the fruit flies. I could have just filled our spare tray with shredded paper and used that as the top tray. The flies wouldn't be able to navigate through it to get out, and would prevent them from coming or going. Chrysanthemum spray would work too. Lessons learned! Don't overwhelm the tray, and fruit flies can be handled easily!

I checked on them again last month: the fruit flies were gone, the bottom tray had made a lot of progress, and the top tray was not looking like a dirty salad anymore. I noticed that some of our scraps, especially the eggshells, weren't really breaking down at all. Mostly it was the bigger pieces, as I was pretty inconsistent with that, so I think we'll definitely start chopping the bits into smaller pieces; apparently eggshells should also be dry and crumbled too, so something else we'll need to work on.

Overall, though, the worms pulled through just fine and are quite hardy. You don't have to slave over them, really. Leaving them alone for a few weeks, without even checking in, is not the end of the world.

So, now that we've gotten it established, worm care is pretty easy. Follow a few simple guidelines and a rotation schedule every 4-6 weeks, and the fresh compost will start rolling in...


So, what sorts of bedding do they need? Don't they die at some point? What happens once the compost is ready?

coming soon - 

part three: better living with worms

Much Love,
Able-Bodied Girl


  

w/mo2h #4: composting with worms, part one

part one: welcoming your wormies

Before you ask: it's not smelly, you don't have to touch worms if you choose not to, and it does not require a lot of work. Just so's ya know...

Oh, the lady from the Costco ad
makes it look sooooo easy! Bah!

I hate throwing perfectly good food scraps away, and with a garden, it makes sense to to reuse this material for composting. But neither of us were willing to go through all the effort of building and maintaining an outdoor composting spot. So a couple of years ago we started with a small compost bucket in the kitchen, which every week was dumped into the brush at the edge of the yard. At least the weeds were getting fed, right?

Last year, Able-Bodied Boy and I struggled to make a large rotating composter work. We brought it home from Costco, put in some material and waited. We got ants. We waited. Everything else stayed the same. We made adjustments, added wet material or dead material. We finally determined that it was too dry because the bin was actually not really sealed properly. It still sits outside, looking like a small space capsule.

So I finally looked into vermi-composting: the worm method. There is a lot of information out there on the web, with a lot of different variations. I found the Journey to Forever website to be the most useful, from worm information to methods and techniques. I did look around, but this seemed to have concise information, consistent with most everything else I was reading.

One of our first considerations was location: we did not want stinky, buggy compost inside! Worms like consistent temperatures, and being out of the sun and rain, but they also don't produce odors or bugs readily. There were certain types of foodstuff that might induce a bad smell, or attract bugs, so I read that you just had to introduce those items slowly, if at all, to test how your batch reacted. So it seemed as if a basement location would actually work for us. Worst-case scenario: the stink could remain isolated to one corner of the basement, and if bugs became a huge problem we could take it outside while we regrouped and figured out what we did wrong.

Now, we were not keen to build our own box, so we opted for the Worm Factory. It's a tray system that allows you to have several different "stages" going at once, and a drain for excess water. Our main shopping venue is Amazon, and it's super-saver shipping, so we worked with those parameters in our search. There are plenty of other models out there similar to each other, and I have no doubt that each of them has pros, cons, and things you just plain adjust to. With some good reviews and features, we opted for the Worm Factory, bought a pound of worms, and waited for delivery.

The Worm Factory. We likie!

Providing us with complete instructions on how to care for the worms, and the bedding for the first batch, made setup very easy. The bedding they provided was a coir brick and some shredded paper; just soak the coir, then mix in paper. Our worms came in a small canvas bag, so they were easily dumped in. They recommend putting sheets of paper in the bottom of the lower tray (to keep the worms from dropping through to the base) and on top of the lid (to keep them in and keep the lid from getting too gross), and the box it came in was fulled with long sheets of paper padding, so we didn't even have to get any newspaper. Super simple! It even has a summary of instructions on the lid for convenience.

So everything went perfectly well for the first two months, despite one episode of worm suicide. Then Thanksgiving came and the worms revolted...  

What will happen next to our fair wormie friends? Why did some commit suicide? What was sacrificed in the Thanksgiving Day Massacre?

coming soon - 
part two: the great worm suicide, the thanksgiving day massacre, and other issues
part three: better living with worms


Much Love,
Able-Bodied Girl


  

how to have an un-green day

After writing yesterday's post (several days ago, mind you), I found myself feeling a bit defeated by life. Might have just been a mood, or some other personal things weighing me down, but sustainability suddenly felt more like a burden and a curse than a positive lifestyle to strive for.

My composting worms (aka, the wormies) got overwhelmed with Thanksgiving goodies, so I don't really give them anything these days, since they are thriving with what they have and we don't have the space to expand too much further. Before real composting occurred we used to just throw the food waste into the brush at the edge of the property...

So, I felt pretty defeated with every onion peel I casually tossed into the trash.

Rather than walking the extra 10 feet to grab a rag, I used paper towels to clean up every little mess in the kitchen. We don't compost these either, so into the trash they went...

Grocery purchases had HFCS or unpronounceable ingredients, things I normally check for and make consideration of before going to the check-out. We didn't even think to bring our reusable canvas bags. I wasn't bothered by it when I forgot to wash my non-organic vegetables. Lately, we've been turning up the heat because I've been cold.

Able-Bodied Boyfriend is talking about buying a new mattress set for us soon. I'm concerned about the materials used to make mattresses, and tried showing him some information.  He's willing to entertain "eco-friendly" mattresses, but only if they're of good, lasting quality; this definition did not make organic or sustainably-produced products seem like a viable option for him. I'd sacrifice the durability for peace-of-mind, but this is not my decision alone. I nearly cried when we walked into the local mattress store, choking on the smell of the chemicals, feeling defeated again. If I can't express my views in a way that inspires him, how will I in any way show you that there are options worth considering? (There will definitely be more on the mattress purchase later...)

Time after time this weekend, I found myself wasting something that was preventable, not making those simple every-day choices that I have been able to make in the past. For one day I totally failed, and felt every failure as a scar on my not-earth-friendly-enough soul. Yes, yes, I'm being dramatic. Even Able-Bodied Boyfriend noticed and took his lunch in another room. But this isn't the person I want to be, dammit!  I want to care and put forth the effort 24/7!

Maybe I need days like this to remind me how far I've come, and how far yet I have to go. Reminders of all the little choices that are becoming normal, that for one day were punted back in time to the days when I didn't care how much crap went to the landfill or what I put in/on my body. Reminders that I'm not perfect, and that not making these choices doesn't make me or anyone else imperfect or evil or a pawn of the establishment or some nonsense.

I'm also reminded of all the things I do now, that I don't even think about anymore.  That I couldn't possibly not do because they're completely normal to me now. These are the things that are comforting on days like this.

Choices. They are what make us. Choose based on your priorities, on your needs, and on your vision of you and the life you want to lead. And every once in a while, it's ok to have an opposite day to remind yourself why you liked those decisions in the first place :)

Do you have bad days that turn out to be reminders of all that is good?

Much Love,
Able-Bodied Girl